Ichneumonoidea
The superfamily Ichneumonoidea contains one extinct and two extant families, including the two largest families within Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae and Braconidae. The group is thought to contain as many as 100,000 species, many of which have not yet been described. Like other parasitoid wasps, they were long placed in the "Parasitica", variously considered as an infraorder or an unranked clade, now known to be paraphyletic.

Bruce Marlin · CC BY-SA 2.5 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- ApocritaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Arthropoda
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Insecta
Time the record covers
At least 143 million years on record.
The record covers at least 143.1 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 149.2 Mya to 0 Mya.
852 occurrences of Ichneumonoidea on record, most of them in the Eocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
852 occurrences- Late Jurassicunder 1%
- Early Cretaceous10%
- Late Cretaceous7%
- Paleoceneunder 1%
- Eocene58%
- Oligocene12%
- Miocene7%
- Pliocene1%
- Pleistocene3%
- Holoceneunder 1%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
69 formations
- Florissant Formation115
- Bouldnor Formation · Solent Group60
- Rott Formation36
- Fur Formation26
- Zaza Formation25
- Niveau du gypse d'Aix Formation23
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The named rock units Ichneumonoidea has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 45 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 341 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Ichneumonoidea and its relatives
EoceneWhere Ichneumonoidea and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
7,811 taxa- Ichneumonidae29 sites
- Formicidae28 sites
- Coleoptera17 sites
- Curculionidae16 sites
- Braconidae15 sites
- Yantaromyrmex geinitzi12 sites
- Prenolepis henschei11 sites
- Formica10 sites
- Gesomyrmex hoernesi10 sites
- Staphylinidae10 sites
- Carabidae9 sites
- Diptera9 sites
- Lepidoptera9 sites
- Myrmicinae9 sites
- Nylanderia pygmaea9 sites
- Acrididae8 sites
- Anisoptera8 sites
- Ctenobethylus goepperti8 sites
- Lasius schiefferdeckeri8 sites
- Tetraponera simplex8 sites
- Tipula8 sites
- Aphanus pulchellus7 sites
- Bibio7 sites
- Bibionidae7 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 239 sites for Ichneumonoidea, and this reads all of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
204 references- The parasitic Hymenoptera of the Tertiary of Florissant, Colorado95
- The Parasitic Hymenoptera of the Baltic Amber94
- The wasps, bees and ants (Insecta: Vespida=Hymenoptera) from the Insect Limestone (Late Eocene) of the Isle of Wight, UK40
- Les insectes fossiles des terrains oligocènes de France28
- High diversity of pimpline parasitoid wasps (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae, Pimplinae) from the lowermost Eocene Fur Formation (Denmark)23
- Fossil Arthropods in the British Museum, V. Oligocene Hymenoptera from the Isle of Wight22
- Ueber alte und neue fossile Hymenopterenfunde aus den Tertiaren Ablagerungen von Rott am Siebengebirge20
- Los Aphidiidae fósils de Wittenheim (Haut-Rhin, Francia) (Hym. Brac)19
- New Eoichneumonidae from Early Cretaceous of Siberia and Mongolia (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonoidea)18
- Fossil Darwin wasps (Hymenoptera, Ichneumonidae) from the Middle Pleistocene Shiobara Group, Tochigi Prefecture, Japan17
- New ichneumonids (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) from the Lower Cretaceous of north China16
- A new subfamily of ichneumon wasps (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) from the Upper Cretaceous of the Russian far east16
Each of the 852 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 192 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Ichneumonoidea
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Bruce Marlin
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.5
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Ichneumonoidea was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itApocrita through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Latreille 1802